The Innocent Novel is Now Impossible

Every time someone ventures the idea that there is a crisis of the novel, a critic with the good health of our Literature at heart can be found to reply that the novel has never been in such fine fettle, since an enormous number of them are being published. But this is to conceive the crisis in excessively quantitative terms; it is a phenomenon that in no way precludes proliferation. . . .

. . . This is, perhaps, what is happening today with the novel, if you will concede that most of the creditable and original works currently being published are problematical novels in which the fiction is accompanied by a questioning of the basic categories of novelistic creation, as though, since the ideal novel — the innocent novel — is now impossible, literature had principally to say how it is running from itself and killing itself — in short, how it is rejecting itself.

In France this began with Proust. Throughout his enormous oeuvre, Proust is always about to write. He has the traditional literary act in his sights, but he constantly puts it off and it is at the end of this period of expectation, an expectation he never meets, that the work has been constructed in spite of itself. It was the waiting itself that formed the substance of a work whose suspended nature was enough to set the writer speaking.

The most conscious forms of novel-writing today are all part of this Proustian movement by which the writer sets his novel going before our eyes and then consigns it to silence at a point when, a hundred years earlier, he would have barely begun to speak.